Pricing
The price rise nobody argued with
A price increase that produces no complaints and no cancellations is usually read as vindication. It is better read as an unfinished measurement.
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Operations
Your supplier’s variability is sitting on your balance sheet
Most buffer stock isn't cover for your customers. It's cover for a supplier who quotes four weeks and sometimes means…
Pricing
The price you’re matching may be a balance sheet, not a strategy
A competitor's price tells you something real, but often about how they are funded rather than how efficiently they work.
Operations
The float that only works while bookings rise
Customer deposits can make a business look liquid for years, until the diary stops filling and the money turns out…
Operations
The last ten percent of capacity costs more than the first ninety
Utilisation targets look like efficiency and behave like debt, and the arithmetic of queues explains why the same team suddenly…
Leadership
The number moved because you asked it to
Putting a target on a metric buys you an improvement and spends the information the metric used to carry. Most…
Growth strategy
The cancellation is a receipt, not a decision
Most businesses date a lost customer by the day the paperwork arrived: which is rarely the day anything was actually…
Growth strategy
The relationships that don’t come with the business
Most owners are told to document their processes before a sale. The discount buyers actually apply is aimed at something…
Operations
The dip you fixed was going to fix itself
Most weekly numbers move for no reason at all, and the meeting that responds to them is quietly making the…
Operations
The approval you have never refused
A sign-off limit set at an earlier size of business quietly converts senior judgement into a queue, and moves the…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.